Perhaps OT: Audioscrobbler

I thought this might be of interest to many of you and wanted to pass it along. Audioscrobbler, www.audioscrobbler.com, is a rather interesting tool for music listeners. From their website:

Audioscrobbler is a computer system that builds up a detailed profile of your musical taste. After installing an Audioscrobbler Plugin, your computer sends the name of every song you play to the Audioscrobbler Server. With this information, the Audioscrobbler server builds you a 'Musical Profile'. Statistics from your Musical Profile are shown on your Audioscrobbler User Page, available for everyone to view.

There are lots of people using Audioscrobbler, but you probably won't be interested in most of them. The Audioscrobbler Server calculates which people are most similar to you, based on shared musical taste, so you can take a look at what your peers are listening to.

With this information, Audioscrobbler is able to automatically generate suggestions for new songs/artists you might like. These suggestions are based on the same principles as Amazon's "People who bought this also bought X,Y,Z", but because the Audioscrobbler data is what people are actually listening to, the suggestions tend to make more sense than Amazon.

Plug-ins are available for a wide variety of players, including Winamp, Windows Media Player, and iTunes. If interested, please take a look. You can see what I'm listening to by clicking on the 'Find' drop-down boxes in the left hand pane, selecting 'Username', and entering my handle. I also started a forum under the 'General' category called 'Disney Theme Park Music' if folks have questions about tracks listed. The site, while free, has been closed to new users for the last week but is now open to new users for a limited time. Although a useful tool, it can go down for maintenance or udpates at any time so beware. It's free, and a neat way to 'see' what you're hearing.